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Know Ai Weiwei? I ask because if you’ve heard of any contemporary artist at all in the past half-decade, it’s more likely than not to be the jocular Chinese humanist for whom making art and aggravating the ruling party of his native land — where he has committed to live, despite the dangers — have become the celebrated, inseparable twin engines of his burgeoning fame.

It was this fame, no doubt, that drew documentary filmmaker Alison Klayman to Ai a few years back, when his nagging insistence at questioning the power structures of a so-called “new” China clamouring to join the First World as something other than a manufacturing centre made him the regime’s most annoying and visible touchstone.

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Ai collaborated with celebrated Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron to create Beijing’s remarkable stadium for the 2008 Olympic games — the “bird’s nest,” as it became known — and just as the games were about to begin, Ai staked his claim. Using his newfound fame as a platform, Ai said the games were a propaganda platform for a still-brutal regime trying to recast its authoritarian rule as a kinder, gentler kind of totalitarianism, and Ai would have none of it. In so doing, he established himself an international dissident icon just as surely as he painted a target on his back.

In the years that follow, he sets about painting it bigger, brighter and impossible to miss. In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Ai became incensed at an official death toll of schoolchildren who perished in shoddily built school buildings, suggesting an unbelievably low casualty count. Traveling to Chengdu with his team, they set about the groundwork of a full count of the dead. They visited schools and compiled lists, spoke to parents, teachers and whoever else would offer information.

They counted more than 5,000 children, and reported it to authorities, who flatly denied it. But it hardly mattered. Ai did what Ai does: In Germany later that year, he built a massive installation from schoolkids’ backpacks — one for each of the dead — that became an international cause celebre, and a source of unending embarrassment for a regime working hard to recast its international image.

In the same moment, Ai had turned from aggravation to threat, and Klayman’s constant companionship charts his voyage into increasingly dangerous waters. On one of his Chengdu trips to testify at the trial of a local activist, Ai is assaulted in the middle of the night by police and detained to prevent his testimony. In Beijing, his studio becomes surrounded by security cameras. Outside its wall, plainclothes police monitor the door for comings and goings 24 hours a day.

All of this about Ai we know, as we do his pushing past a breaking point in April of last year, when he was finally incarcerated and detained for almost three months. (He was released, on probation, and temporarily silenced; within a month, he had returned to his favourite instrument, Twitter, in earnest). What we don’t know, and Klayman shows us, is the warm, friendly, deeply sincere creature this monolithic character is.

This is not merely hagiography, though with a character like Ai, who devotes all of his time and energy, and nearly his own life, to pushing past the archaic brutalities of communist rule, it would have been easy enough. Klayman shows us a sensitive, soft-spoken sensualist — Ai likes to eat, whether pigs trotters in an outdoor café in Chengdu while being harassed by police, to the Carnegie Deli in New York, where he packs his bag with a half-dozen corned beef sandwiches and pickles — who enjoys the spoils of fame, and assumes responsibility for his too-human indulgences.

He has an adulterous affair with an acolyte that produces a son, for example, which he didn’t intend, but “it was (the mother’s) right to keep him, and I accepted full responsibility as a father.” Speaking to a journalist at the Tate Modern in London, it’s suggested, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, that as a famous artist, he’s entitled to a little indulgence. “Not really — you’re not allowed to do that,” he says softly. Nonetheless, it is what it is. With his 18-month-old son, Ai is the attentive, affectionate father, and his mission becomes less abstract altruism and more fully realized as an urgent, personal cause.

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In the end, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry accomplishes what the best works of this sort do: Take a great, compelling, widely known story and make it deeper, fuller and better. For all his towering significance, Klayman gives us not Ai, the icon, but the funny, frank, warmhearted, wildly creative force whose own goodness isn’t touched by a little dark here and there. Ai is, after all, only human, whatever else you’ve been led to believe; thank heavens for that. It’s his humanity, nothing else, that makes him the force he is.

Life goes on for Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei was released from detention on June 22, 2011. Arriving at his Beijing compound, he apologized to reporters for not being able to speak about his ordeal. “I’m on probation. Please understand,” he said.

After a brief period of silence, Ai resumes his activities on Twitter, unbowed by the intimidation tactics that now include a $1.85 million (U.S.) fine for tax evasion, which the government offers as justification for his detention. Never Sorry ends with cash donations turning up at the studio from thousands of supporters. Here’s what’s happened since:

• October 2011: The government revises its penalty to $2.4 million. Ai says he will fight the judgment and the fine. Thousands of people send money through wire transfers; some throw cash stuffed in envelopes or wrapped around fruit into his yard. He uses the donations to pay a $1.3 million guarantee to the court.

• June 22, 2012: Ai’s year-long probation, which prohibited his leaving his Beijing studio compound, ends, but authorities tell him he cannot leave the country as he remains under investigation for fraud, and the charges against him now include bigamy and pornography. “If getting back half of my freedom means I'm free, then I'm a free person,” Ai said. “But they're restricting my ability to travel and still trying to fabricate crimes.”

• July 20, 2012: Ai is informed that his legal challenge to a $2.4 million fine of tax evasion from the Chinese government has been denied. The charge became the government’s justification of his 2011 detention. “Today's verdict means that after 60 years of the founding of our nation, we still lack the basic legal procedures, the truth is not respected, and they do not give taxpayers or citizens any rights to defend oneself,” Ai told reporters at his Beijing design studio.

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